About

Having worked for more than 10 years as IT consultant across Europe and North America and with a background in physics and strategy management I am utterly fascinated by the prospect of quantum computing becoming a reality.

On this blog I will try to separate fact from VC fiction and to predict what impact quantum computing will have on corporate IT.

Disclaimer: All opinions and analysis on this blog (with the obvious exception of comments) are my own and do in no way reflect on my employer.

Disclaimer Update: At this point, I run my own start-up, and so the Disclaimer no longer applies until we grow up and become all corporate again.

thanks for checking on me, but I have to admit since I put my fringe blog on ice, I am not following this very closely anymore. Just don’t expect Rossi to be able to deliver anything, generally don’t have very high hopes for LENR unless there’s a real theoretical breakthrough. Still put the chances at 50% that there is a reality to it.

As to the US partner, unless this was a big gun that instills confidence in their ability to perform due diligence (e.g. GE, Lockheed, that kind of sort) I wouldn’t put much stock into it.

But that is actually the most fascinating part of this. Industrial Heat is just the kind of entity that I would expect to perform due diligence.

Darden, the managing partner of IH is on the board of governors of RTI International. In their press release, IH claims to have been present at performance tests and had an independent expert certify the tests. It is fairly clear this was the test of the 1MW device performed in April 2013.

It would be surprising if Darden who is on the board of RTI (with its president) used someone other than RTI to perform the due diligence. I think this bodes well for good due diligence.

They have also had 9 months to find out they were taken and nevertheless came out with the press release.

It is also quite clear further tests are being performed by an independent group and those results will be reported in the spring.

I know I am considered a dumb believer but I have a feeling this is going to be pretty interesting. I suggest you reengage.

hi nice blog, great topic, its really nice to find someone a bit less ideological & axegrinding than scott aaronson writing intelligently/ engagingly/ enthusiastically/ passionately on the topic. see also dwave/ inception of the qm computing dream. an idea… am thinking over many parallels of dwave/rose to Babbage lately, planning a blog on that sometime, maybe something for you to explore also in a blog? 💡

Thanks! The Babbage comparison is an interesting one. Although I think it’ll equally offend both sides 🙂

I’d imagine that Geordie R. would argue that unlike Babbage, D-Wave delivered a finished product, whereas Scott A. could point to the fact that the theoretical foundations of the Babbage machine were completely solid, while there’s no proof that D-Wave can achieve a quantum speed-up.

its a complicated topic/ connection. its only a rough analogy in various ways. my idea is that the basic parallels is that rose is like babbage in that he envisions a working machine that maybe theoretically sound but almost impossible to achieve in practice due to engineering complexity, he is ahead of his time in that maybe someday QM machines will be more commonplace but for now, there is barely even a single one in the entire world. the other strong analogy is the crazy cost of the machine, reportedly over $100M so far, making its construction very difficult as far as gaining financing/ investors. however, babbage was largely funded by the british govt, whereas rose has gone the entrepreneur/private funding route. another strong analogy is the scientific naysayers of babbages time (who it seems aaronson has parallels) and the intense scientific debate of the machine viability or usefulness while it was being constructed. during that period there was a lot of debate whether the machine was worth it even if it worked compared to the cost of human calculators, ie the “competition”, which was far less in comparison… again similar to the modern “speedup” debate etc…..